Materials Reuse finds innovative uses for post-industrial materials being thrown away, sells the materials to other industries for reuse, and provide equipment such as balers, compactors, etc. at their customer sites to ensure reuse.

The ReUse People of Alameda County, Inc. provide salvaging services, deconstruction consulting, and reuse sales of building materials for the Bay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego. When they needed to expand transportation capabilities, The ReUse People received a loan to purchase additional trailers and a used bobtail truck.

Merritt Crossing is the first building in California to achieve Energy Star certification under the multifamily high-rise rating system. The project also received LEED Platinum, GreenPoint Rated and Bay-Friendly Rated Landscape certifications.

Enthusiastic owner-builders, Stefanie Parrott and Dixon Beatty “take their sustainable building seriously while approaching the daily grind of their owner-built project with a real sense of humor,” says their architect, Geoffrey Holton. The owners’ green goals started with the purchase of a Victorian house in the Oakland Point Historic District.

Built 1908, Michael Boal's 2,200-square-foot Berkeley home was “remuddled” a few times over the decades, but still retained much of its traditional style. Boals brought in David Grubb Construction to rebuild the back of the house while preserving its nearly 100-year-old spirit.

Berkeley residents Kristin Leimkuhler and Jeffrey Wilk hired McCutcheon Construction to modernize their 1894 Victorian while preserving the building’s traditional exterior. Raising the house by three feet allowed them to transform a six-foot-high unfinished basement into a contemporary wheelchair-accessible first floor, doubling the home’s size to 2,815 square feet.

A study by researchers at UC Berkeley and UCLA found that homes in California labeled with Energy Star, GreenPoint Rated or LEED sell for a premium of nine percent compared to comparable, non-labeled homes. This is the first rigorous, large-scale independent economic analysis of the value of green home labels in California.